Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Musicians Without Borders

At the second annual Big Ears music festival in Knoxville, Tenn., Oliver Sim of the xx, an electronic-pop band from England, played in the Bijou.Credit
Brian Wagner for The New York Times

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Combining the essences of different kinds of music used to be a stroke of creativity. Now it’s almost a rule of commerce. The word eclecticism has been used so much for the last 30 years that it has become meaningless — a sad, grasping pile of obstruents and sibilants, like a dying fire’s last pops and hisses.

But deep audience crossover — not just an artist deciding to mix disparate styles, or listeners who are basically one set of bohemians talking to another — remains a different thing. It’s still rare. That’s where there’s work to be done.

I saw that kind of crossover over the weekend here at Big Ears, a festival of rock, classical and experimental music that has grown ambitiously in its second year. The event’s three days of music centered on downtown and the Old City neighborhood, trading on inherent connections among musical languages and the artists’ own relationships with one another.

Curious people were walking into events that weren’t necessarily aimed directly at them, their age group, their interests. There were well-put-together retirement-age women listening to Shelley Hirsch and the Shaking Ray Levis play loony, aggressive improvised music at a club, and trendy kids listening to a Terry Riley string quartet in a concert hall.

The producers displayed no pretension or hand-wringing — no stated rubric of avant-gardism and no rhetoric about how it’s our responsibility to support experimental composers as a cause. Instead the experience was more like a string of mind-blowing midnight movies.

I caught 27 sets from Friday to Sunday — there were about 60 in all — and I never felt tired or let down by bad sound. Since last year I’d been looking forward to revisiting the Bijou, a perfectly configured 700-seat historic theater with balconies. There, in bits and pieces, I saw the electronic-pop band the xx, from England, and jj, doing a Swedish version of the same, in front of almost ridiculously romantic films of youth and beauty on beaches and soccer fields; the singer and harpist Joanna Newsom performing the 11-minute title track of her new album, “Have One on Me” (Drag City), a gold-star piece of composition; two composer-performers, Nico Muhly and Thomas Bartlett, sitting back-to-back at keyboards and playing music by Peter Pears, Sam Amidon and, uh, Kenny Loggins; and Jens Hannemann, a fictional German drum-technique instructor portrayed by the “Saturday Night Live” comedian Fred Armisen.

But the 1,500-seat Tennessee Theater, a Moorish Revival movie house a few blocks from the Bijou and also recently renovated, was dreamier still: a palace as big as an ocean liner, where sound reveals itself naturally and precisely, in what Wallace Stevens called its “spontaneous particulars.” The Tennessee was where Vampire Weekend and Dirty Projectors — currently the Beatles and the Stones of Brooklyn rock — and the rock band the National filled the house. It was also where William Basinski created his sepulchral, heavily textured ambient tape-loop music, and where the Books played instrumental chamber-folk as soundtracks for their own slight-but-cool collage films.

The organizer of Big Ears, Ashley Capps of AC Entertainment, who also produces the annual Bonnaroo festival from his office here, stayed with the core strategy of last year’s edition: he got a gray eminence, influential across music’s genre lines, to anchor it. Last year it was Philip Glass; this year it was Terry Riley, 74.

Mr. Riley, or his music, was presented in five concerts through the weekend. He played solo organ in a University of Tennessee auditorium; the Calder Quartet did right by his rigorous, concentrated piece for strings, “Cadenza on the Night Plain”; he presented “Autodreamographical Tales,” with the Bang on a Can All-Stars improvising around his readings of dream diaries; and, for an ensemble of 20 or so, he conducted “In C,” one of the original Minimalist earth-shakers, written in 1964, a long piece of 53 tiny repeated melodic snippets introduced in order.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Mr. Riley also enjoyed a fair number of other people’s shows, especially the art-song band Clogs. (“They were the hit for me,” he said, beaming over breakfast on Monday morning. “Great performers, great writing. I’m going to buy their CD when I get home.”)

But the festival also tried some new things this year. It brought in corporate sponsors, which were felt only lightly: two wordless crown logos projected on the walls of the Tennessee Theater were the only visible reminder that the event’s main sponsor was Regal Entertainment Group, the Knoxville-based movie-theater chain. And Mr. Capps brought in an artist-curator to help book the festival: Bryce Dessner, of the National.

Whatever you may think of the National — Matt Berninger’s ebb-tide baritone and the band’s grandiose anthemic surges, even in the Tennessee, left me cold — the collaboration was a great idea. Mr. Dessner really knows how to make the music of nightclubs and conservatories intersect, and through the weekend he was an important connector, showing up with the “In C” ensemble, as a member of Clogs, and with Mr. Muhly and Mr. Bartlett.

Likewise, other festival participants appeared on the National’s stage: Sufjan Stevens, Mr. Muhly, Mr. Bartlett (a k a Doveman), Shara Worden (a k a My Brightest Diamond), and Annie Clark (a k a St. Vincent). And other collaborations that have happened before — Ms. Hirsch with the Shaking Ray Levis, and DJ/Rupture with Andy Moor, the guitarist from the Dutch punk band the Ex — were reopened with go-for-broke results.

Minimalism, which is Mr. Riley’s ballpark, can be expressed through many musical languages. After getting a headful of Ms. Newsom, I went to the Pilot Light, a tiny bar, to hear Argentinum Astrum, a fantastic doom-metal band from Knoxville. Repeated riffs so fat, loud, slow and heavy that the individual notes are nearly disconnected: what’s more minimal than that? Nothing. Consider yourself informed.

And the genre-based guessing game — what kind of music is it really? what’s the intention? who’s it for? — rang through the festival. There were the Books, with their films appropriated from 1990s instructional videos. There was Doveman, with his soft-rock covers. There was the semi-rock star Andrew W. K., ambitious and inscrutable, collaborating as a pianist with the Calder Quintet, on music by Bach, Fred Frith and John Cage. They closed with a properly audience-enraging version of Cage’s all-silent “4’33”.” Andrew W .K. also gave a kind of self-help lecture at the Knoxville Museum of Art that was somehow both provocative and bland; when the audience pressed him to state whether he believed in fate or free will, he grew confused and overwrought.

And there was Mr. Armisen, in gym shorts and a wig of long black hair, who as a smug docent of “complicated drum technique” showed the audience how to play a beat in a 23/9 time signature.

“The kick drum is only on the 9, the 13 and the 18,” he explained in a soft German accent. (Later he mimicked the drum styles of John Bonham, Neil Peart, Ringo Starr and Meg White, quite accurately, or accurately enough for his self-absorbed character.) Mr. Armisen really can play the drums, and the joke was all in the space between his own middling ability and the mind-shattering virtuosity of Jens Hannemann.

A version of this review appears in print on March 30, 2010, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Musicians Without Borders. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe